


Accidents Happen

by NervousAsexual



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Accidental Death, Could be either, McSpirk - Freeform, One Shot, POV Kirk, SO SAD, Sad, Why Did I Write This?, just embrace the goddamn spones, spones - Freeform, this is worse than that quantum leap fic from last year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 07:07:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7090885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was an accident. So why is Spock acting guilty?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accidents Happen

I was there at the moment the last breath left his lungs. He went quietly, didn't sleep and didn't speak, but looked around with dull glassy eyes. Nurse Chapel performed admirably, confirming what we all knew. Christine is the heart of the Enterprise's med bay.

Of the four hundred and some crew aboard I'd estimate a third turned up to pay their respects. Most were enlisted--members of disastrous away team expeditions or engineers with bum legs or science teams who had worked with him once in times of strife. Christine kept most of them at bay and eventually they stopped queuing in the halls. Most of the bridge crew came to stand at his side, every one of us except the one we had always expected would be there. Despite regular updates from both engineering and science no one had seen Spock in days.

Very early Christine paged me down and we sat with him alone while he gasped for breath. I held his left hand and Christine held his right and no one spoke and as we listened to the hum of the engines he cried a little, until she gave him more morphine. After that he was quiet. I must have dozed. Christine tapped my arm and whispered, "Captain, he's gone." I was still holding his hand.

While she covered him with the sheet I went to wipe the sleep from my eyes. Eventually she joined me and I thought of him lying cold and alone in the empty infirmary.

"What will you put on the autopsy report?" I asked her. I tried to draft the log in my head, but what was there to say?

Christine washed and dried her hands.

"Combination radiation poisoning and internal trauma," she said at last. "An accident."

We went our separate ways. She had her autopsy to complete, and I still had the log to write.

Security came to get me not long after. They'd found Spock back where it all began, examining the warp drive. They put him in the brig, and that was where I found him.

He didn't speak either but stood at attention, looking only a little tired.

"He's gone, Spock."

He nodded. "I see."

"That's all you can say?"

"I would prefer it wasn't so. But there is nothing I can do and further upset would be..."

"Illogical. Yes."

When I said nothing else, he finally added, "Doctor McCoy would undoubtedly find this quite... appropriate."

He did not move and in his motionless I saw the stillness of Bones. That prodded me further than I would have liked.

"I should have known. You Vulcans and your total barrenness of emotion."

"You are mistaken, captain. It is not that we do not have emotions but that emotions are meant to be controlled. It is dangerous to leave them unchecked."

"Is that right? So you are done. The door is closed. Wall up your grief, if you have any."

He said nothing but neither had Bones. I thought I could still feel his hand, swelled up half again as big as usual, chapped and scarred from the radiation. Spock could choose to speak. Bones would never speak again.

"If I may ask, captain, on charges am I being held?"

My hand felt so empty, pulling in my attention like a black hole. "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing, Spock. My log and Nurse Chapel's report both ruled the death accidental."

"With all due respect, I very much doubt that Doctor McCoy would have approved."

"'With all due respect,' Spock, you're wrong."

Again he said nothing.

"He held on for a long time. Longer than we thought he could. He waited for you."

I looked at him and he looked away.

"I..." he said, and cleared his throat. "I had assumed he did not survive the fall."

"We both underestimated an old country doctor," I said. "As usual."

He turned back to me but did not look. "I would see the body, with your permission, captain."

It was not an unreasonable request but it burned at me that only now, when any danger was past, now, when it no longer mattered, did he make such a request.

There was no reason to refuse him. He was not to be held on any charge; what happened happened due to neither malice nor neglect. But I stayed at his side as we crossed the starship. I felt I owed that to Bones, at least.

Christine had left so it was I who pulled back the sheet and I watched him take in the burns that could not be healed, the broken bones set carefully beneath the skin, and I did not see the horror or the sadness I hoped to see.

Instead he put his hand against Bones' cheek, as he had done a long, long time ago. He wrapped his arms around the body and against the thrum of the engine he sang,

_he traveled through the windswept hills_

_and crossed the barren fire plains_

_to find the silent monks of kir_

_still unfulfilled he journeyed home_

_told stories of the lessons learned_

_and gained true wisdom by the giving_

He didn't look at me but he asked, "Jim, do you remember when the doctor first learned about the sehlat?"

"Your giant teddy bear. Yes."

"Doctor McCoy seemed to find the idea quite amusing. But it occurs to me that he and I-Chaya were not so different. In how they lived and in how they died."

But it wasn't the death that angered me. Bones had tried to give his life for ours more times than I could count. I suspect that we valued his life more than he did. What pushed me past empathy was a man I believed to be honorable would allow him to go all but alone.

It had been a long, long time since anger had gripped me this way. The last untouched part of myself looked down at what was left of Bones and I thought I recognized him between the burns and the bruising and the broken bones. A sob rose up in my throat and as I fought to keep it in I recognized something else as well. Spock held his head with one hand, his other arm tucked under his back.

"Like he taught you," I said.

"We are diminished by his death," he said softly, "but we were enriched by his life."

**Author's Note:**

> Oh god, it was based on a dream I had. Because those always turn out well. Right?


End file.
